Everybody Struggles
Week 3 as an Outreachy intern with OpenRefine
Hello, Week 3 started on a high, (except you’er Nigerian and had to deal with that sham of a Democacracy Day) but towards the end of the day, I developed malaria symptoms, which I’m getting better from anyway, so YAY!.
It’s three weeks into my internship with OpenRefine and I’d firstly, like to say that I propably have the best mentor in this Outreachy cohort. Lozana is just amazing and I am loving being her mentee.
Struggles. Struggles. Answers
My first introduction to open source was a bit scarry because I was thrown into the world of Github and I just couldn’t wrap my haed around what was going on. Particularly the reason I struggled so much in my first application to Outreachy.
As a UI/UX designer, it is most likley that in the first few years of your program or career, that you will not have a thing to do with Github and Github issues as most startups and small companies use other task management and tracking tools, like Jira, Asana and Trello and these were the tools I was used to and always believed that Github was simply just for developers.
Returning and applying again for Outreachy with OpenRefine immensely helped with my familiarity of Github as evrything revolved around Github and the community always helped by creating “Good first issues” and assigned taks to interested applicants to curb competition. That way, we were encouraged to take our time on the issues and understand them better.
This week and the next, my tasks concern analysisng the Ui of OpenRefine and I struggled with undesratnding where to begin, what to focus on and how to group my findings. The likeliest thing to do was to reach out to my mentor , which I am glad I did.
She provided robust context and guidance to my task that it’s made it so easy to carry out and asides from being bugged by malaria, it’s been a very productive week on my end.
In my experience as someone who rarely gets to actually have questions, I have realized that often times, one justs needs to ask and mentors are happy to help. At least mine is. And it’s perfectly alright to struglle and admit that one is struggling (even if it’s just informimg your mentor about your health struggles).
In the next week, which is Week 4, i’ll let you know aht I find in my analysis and also keep you up to date with my internship.
Stay Jiggy!